sstewie Hi Stewie,
I'm sorry you experienced poor sound quality, I hope you could still hear something. Thanks for mentioning the issue, although I didn't face any problem with the audio while recording. It's something I'll keep in mind.
I'm not sure I fully understand your question on how to make materials photorealistic. The idea behind this tutorial is to be able to use new nodes that can help you adding imperfection to your material: by combining scratches, chipped paint, smudges, worn edges and cavities dirt to any type of material (metal, wood, leather, you name it: the possibilities are infinite!) you can increase its believability and make it more realistic.
I wanted to focus specifically on generating generic masks that can then be used to any type of material: you can use the one provided by the Shader Forge series for example.
There's a .blend file attached to the tutorial that you can download: in this source file you can find a material named "Worn_material" with a more complex node setup. I made a specific frame for the wear and tear mask that you can use and tweak in order to match your goal.
Also keep in mind that photorealism also relies a lot on lighting.
I hope this help!
Cheers,
/Thibaut.
Hi sstewie - This is not a tutorial about making photorealistic materials. It's about edge and cavity masking which are important aspects of material creation, including photorealistic materials. It will take many videos to understand how to create photorealistic materials in general. I recommend you start with the Fundamentals of Shading and then progress to the Shader Forge course.